For years, solid waste removal and transport has generally required the waste removal provider to expend time, money, and resources, to physically access the receptacle in order to determine whether any material is ready to be removed from the receptacle's location. The same issues apply to all types of materials collected at a location. This is a terribly inefficient use of precious resources, usually including burning nonrenewable fossil fuels with the resulting adverse environmental impact, especially when the physical inspection of the receptacle reveals little or no material to be retrieved. Alternately, when a receptacle is filled to, or beyond capacity, and is not inspected, great consternation is caused to the material creator that the expected and contracted levels of service are not being provided by the solid material servicing company.
Through the years many attempts have been made to remotely sense material volume in remote receptacles in order to provide information to the material recovery provider about the current status of material in the remote receptacle. These attempts have often failed to provide adequate, cost effective, reliable, simple technological and/or scalable solutions to the remote sensing challenges. An ongoing challenge is the requirement to provide cost effective power for the remote reporting functions of the remote sensor system.
One company, SmartBin, offers a number of solutions for the remote volumetric monitoring of bins. http://www.smartbin.com Amongst other problems with applying these SmartBin sensors to indoor applications is their requirement to utilize cell phone infrastructure to report each bin's status to the central location. Without expensive and complex special technical infrastructure, many typical offices and buildings do not have adequate cell phone coverage to permit these systems to operate effectively. Often additional and expensive engineering and equipment is needed to provide cell phone coverage within buildings. Generally, cell phone carriers charge monthly fees for providing service in addition to charging usage charges based on the amount and frequency of data transmission through their system. In order for the remote material sensing system to be engineered and manufactured in a cost effective, and economically scalable manner it is very important for installation of the sensors to be able to be performed quickly and easily by workers without extensive technical training or background and must use, to the maximum extent possible, existing infrastructure with no additional monthly or usage charges.
Another company, Big Belly Solar, http://bigbellysolar.com/, has U.S. patents for solar operated smart recycling, mailing and compacting bins. These include U.S. Pat. No. 7,124,680 to Poss, and U.S. Pat. No. 7,481,159 to Poss. These disclosures are primarily based on outside located, solar recharged, bin monitoring systems. As with the SmartBin disclosure above, BigBelly appears to use cellular telephone service to transmit data which has a monthly cost and does not work well within many inside building situations. Solar recharging does not work well with inside fluorescent lights as the light frequency is generally not compatible with standard photovoltaic cells for use in charging batteries from sunlight. One report from a Big Belly customer noted that the cost per receptacle was between $700 and $3,700 dollars, or over 37 times the cost of a normal wire waste receptacle. The cost factor alone would be extremely prohibitive in the highly competitive and commodity driven, for example, shredded paper recycling business, as well as for the collection and or storage of other similar material recovery businesses. For these reasons alone, the Big Belly technology is not acceptable for inside the office remote sensing.
Other systems use mechanical sensors with moving parts that require expensive and/or time consuming maintenance. To be successful, a sensor must be able to be easily installed, often without tools, quickly and easily, in existing receptacles. There must be no moving parts that require service and there can be no hardwired connections for power or communications services. Mechanical sensors, such as the SmartBin system would not meet the cost, functionality and scalability requirements of a successful remote sensor system.